The Official Rackspace Blog » San Franciscohttp://www.rackspace.com/blog
Learn more about the #1 Managed Cloud company. Read recent and most popular posts on subjects like the cloud, our customers and partners, our products and the famous Rackspace culture.Fri, 31 Jul 2015 20:29:11 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.5Mist.io: A Geekdom Startup Simplifying Server Management Across Cloudshttp://www.rackspace.com/blog/mist-io-a-geekdom-startup-simplifying-server-management-across-clouds/
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/mist-io-a-geekdom-startup-simplifying-server-management-across-clouds/#commentsThu, 13 Nov 2014 06:05:45 +0000http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=37268Mist.io is simplified server management across clouds. It features a unified interface for several public and private clouds to eliminate the need to deal with several tools and APIs. Mist.io provides a touch-friendly web console for safe access to your servers from your computer, laptop, smartphone or tablet. In the event of a problem, Mist.io sends a notification, which can be handled from virtually anywhere you are connected. For common, recurring issues you can even automate your Mist.io responses.

“Τhe idea to build Mist.io sprung from our own needs,” explains Chris Psaltis, Co-Founder and CEO of Mist.io. “We had a consulting company since 2009 and we’ve been building and supporting systems for our clients on several clouds. We were a small team so all of us had several responsibilities at the same time, so why not build a tool that lets you act upon alerts from wherever you are no matter where you host your machines? Thus Mist.io was born.”

Mist.io was conceived in Athens, Greece and the team was accepted into Mozilla’s WebFWD startup accelerator and relocated to San Francisco. The company now maintains offices in Greece and the United States at Geekdom San Francisco.

“For us it’s the Geekdom community,” Psaltis says. “You get to meet very smart people doing groundbreaking work. You can network, explore synergies and learn from their experience and expertise. You can also connect with top class mentors from Rackspace to help you out, and every week there’s lots of interesting tech events going on where you get a chance to meet even more interesting people. Overall, Geekdom offers a highly collaborative and inspiring environment that keeps you creative and hungry to push forward.”

“To run our service we need considerably larger infrastructure than the average startup,” Psaltis says. “The Rackspace Startup Program helped us get started quickly and painlessly. Over the last couple of months we came to love the performance of Rackspace machines. You know how much load your machines can handle and you’re not in for sudden surprises. The other important factor was Fanatical Support. Problems will arise and you can solve issues much faster, improve your uptime and forget a few of your worries with Rackspace.”

The Mist.io team strives to create simple and elegant solutions to solve real server management problems, backed by a strong engineering culture.

“We’re very excited as we’ve just secured some additional funding and launched a series of new features and underlying improvements,” adds Psaltis. “Most notably, we’ve expanded the list of server metrics that Mist.io monitors and we’ve added support for user-defined custom metrics, one of our most common feature requests. We also added support for managing Docker hosts and containers. And finally, we’ve just released a command line client for our RESTful API.”

And the Mist.io team isn’t stopping there. It’ll continue to build and improve its product.

“In the next few months we’ll deliver features for larger teams like configurable user access rights and audit logs,” concludes Psaltis. “Also, we’ll freshen up our UI to make it sexier. You’re always welcomed to stop by Geekdom in San Francisco, or Athens if you prefer sunny Greece to sunny California… OK, maybe SF can be a bit cloudy at times…but hey, we’re in the cloud business!”

]]>http://www.rackspace.com/blog/mist-io-a-geekdom-startup-simplifying-server-management-across-clouds/feed/0CloudU Kicks Off Big Data Online Course In A Big Wayhttp://www.rackspace.com/blog/cloudu-kicks-off-big-data-online-course-in-a-big-way/
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/cloudu-kicks-off-big-data-online-course-in-a-big-way/#commentsThu, 24 Apr 2014 20:00:15 +0000http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=35469We have a saying in Texas: Bigger is better. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that CloudU, based in San Antonio, Texas, is getting bigger, too.

To kick-off CloudU Big Data Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) activities, we’ve asked Dave Feinleib to be the featured author of this learning series.

Dave is an advisor, entrepreneur and author of Big Data Demystified, Why Startups Fail and How Yours Can Succeed and the BigDataLandscape.com blog.

He’s also writes about startups, technology and venture capital on Forbes.com.

Join us on Wednesday, April 30 at the San Francisco Rackspace Office as Dave presents a condensed version of his “Actionable Insights from Big Data” workshop. This learning event is free and open to Rackers and the public as room allows (space is limited). If you’re in the San Francisco area and would like to attend, contact cloudu@rackspace.com to reserve a seat.

If you’re not able to attend this event live, not to worry. The presentation will be recorded and packaged as part of the Big Data MOOC learning series, scheduled to be released in June. The MOOC will also include content contributions from other industry leaders including Hortonworks, Facebook, OCP Foundation, and MIT.

Anyone interested in the Big Data MOOC or CloudU Certification can register for free at http://cloudu.rackspace.com. Once you register, you’ll have full access to all CloudU learning opportunities and become part of the global CloudU community.

What are you waiting for? Class is in Session!

More on Dave Feinleib:

Dave Feinleib is Managing Director of The Big Data Group. He founded Content Analytics, a leader in brand and ecommerce analytics, and Speechpad, a leader in audio-video transcription and captioning.

From 2009 – 2011 he was a General Partner at Mohr Davidow, a venture capital firm with $2B under management. While at Mohr Davidow, he invested in Infusionsoft, which raised $54M in follow-on funding from Goldman Sachs and others; RootMusic, which raised an additional $16M in capital; and doxo, which has raised $10M in additional capital.

Prior to joining Mohr Davidow, he started four companies, one of which was acquired by EMC, another by Hewlett Packard, and a third by Keynote Systems. Before that he was a Technical Evangelist at Microsoft, promoting the then unknown Windows operating system.

He holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a BA Summa Cum Laude from Cornell University, where he was a Kodak Scholar.

Highground Hackers’ mission is to innovate for the public good, and we were thrilled to be able to help. We’d like to thank the hackers and mental health experts from the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) who participated; along with other sponsors including Accenture, the Technology Credit Union and Kal Krishnan Consulting Services.

Hackathons are one of the ways Rackspace supports developers, their passions and the larger San Francisco – Bay Area community. Uniquely, the Highground Hackers bring together developers and subject matter experts such as researchers, professors and practitioners to tackle deep technical issues such as mental health. It is at these points where technology and community intersect where Rackspace can have an impact and help.

At the event, more than 70 developers teamed up with faculty members of the CIIS to create solutions to tackle issues like isolation, depression, youth violence, mental health assessments and suicide prevention. Ahead of the event, developers were provided video background for the different issues which were presented by CIIS faculty. While at the event itself, and in the true “Lean” tradition, developers dove deep into target issues with professors, iterated quickly on potential solutions, and developed some very compelling apps.

Some of the apps developed include StreetMom, a smartphone app for dispatching non-emergency mental crisis response teams to calls for mental health help; and HealthHeroes, a proof-of-concept for an on-demand emotional health and well-being service for students.

Tackling issues like mental health can be stressful. During the hackathon there was a yoga class and a chromatherapy room to keep the developers relaxed as they hacked!

CIIS faculty members were thoroughly impressed by the level of dedication exhibited by the developers, and in the process they learned a great deal about the Rackspace Cloud and how apps are developed.

“CIIS is excited to be taking part in this leading-edge combination of technology and academic expertise with our neighbors in San Francisco,” says CIIS President Joseph L. Subbiondo. “This is part of our growing effort to combine local technological expertise with the Institute’s areas of strength to further the public good.”

Along with the the cross-functional team creation and app development, the hackathon featured a fascinating speaker track, including a presentation on Human Flourishing, presented by Meg Jordan PhD, RN, CWP, Department Chair Integrative Health Studies at CIIS; and the presentation Merlin’s New iPhone, where new inventions meet mythology and science fiction, by Craig Chalquist PhD, Department Chair East-West Psychology, at CIIS.

As organizers of the event, we gained a deeper appreciation of the complexities of mental health issues.

For me personally it was extremely rewarding to see experts from two very different fields come together and find solutions with such passion, Together, we got a greater appreciation of mental health in general and a renewed belief that technology can be a real help for a large and struggling percentage of our community.

The hackathon was such a success that the Highground Hackers are organizing another for December 14, with Ron Conway, Super Angel, as keynote speaker. This hackathon, which will take place on the first anniversary of the Sandy Hook massacre, will combine two subjects: gun violence prevention and mental health. Together, we’ll work to find technical solutions that can help prevent such tragedies in the future.

]]>http://www.rackspace.com/blog/geekdom-sf-hosts-highground-hackathon-for-mental-health-more-planned/feed/0Celebrating Openness: The OpenCo Conference Comes Rackspace San Franciscohttp://www.rackspace.com/blog/celebrating-openness-the-openco-conference-comes-rackspace-san-francisco/
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/celebrating-openness-the-openco-conference-comes-rackspace-san-francisco/#commentsFri, 22 Nov 2013 18:00:00 +0000http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=33850Openness is something our business not only strives for but also deeply benefits from, so it was with great pleasure I recently helped coordinate a unique event in our San Francisco office.

OpenCo is a special kind of conference that is a mix between a traditional business conference and an artist’s open studio. It gives participants an opportunity to visit the offices of many of the most exciting companies around the city and interact with technologists, leaders and amazing new products. I was pleased to help welcome visitors to our newly renovated SFO office and introduce them to some of our top engineering talent. The fact that we host Geekdom on the first floor of our office really cements our commitment to startups and resonated with many of our guests.

OpenCO at Rackspace San Francisco

As part of the program, I got to visit Eventbrite, Adobe, GitHub and HotelTonight. I specifically chose these companies because they were tech companies of varying sizes all within a short walk from the Rackspace San Francisco office. When Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier was here earlier this year, he spoke passionately about engaging the technology companies local to our office and I saw working with OpenCo as a great opportunity to get more involved with our tech neighbors.

Hotel Tonight’s office space

While the theme of the conference was innovation, the thing that stuck out most was how much focus the companies put on creating an environment that encouraged their employees to innovate. Eventbrite Cofounder Julia Hartz focused her presentation on building a team of “Britelings” that embodied the core tenets of the company. Adobe’s Vice President, Product Management, Jeffrey Veen, quoted director Steven Soderbergh about keeping an environment that was “relaxed but focused” and spoke about how the company structures its meetings to create strong teams. Github’s CEO Tom Preston-Werner talked about how they had no hierarchical structures and how they give employees the freedom to try things and fail (though hopefully not fail).

Github’s oval office

Gone are the days of Office Space-esque cubicles and vending machines in the kitchen. Say hello to design catalogue-worthy office spaces and kitchens stocked with organic and healthy options. San Francisco’s technology companies are notorious for their perks, and things that once seemed like nice-but-not-necessary extras are table stakes for attracting and keeping talent.

Adobe’s office space

There are other ways of getting great people and keeping them engaged and it’s something we think a lot about at Rackspace. Of course we have free food, ping pong and all the espresso you can drink; but it’s our culture and mission that makes us excited. During our office’s OpenCo session, our speakers Dan DiSpaltro, Taylor Wakefield and Ben Arent spoke about strengths, core values and the support Rackspace provides to each Racker it brings on board.

They talked about how transparency and openness in all we do bring us closer to customers and helps us to better serve their needs. It’s my hope that programs such as OpenCo help us to be even more responsive to our San Francisco community of innovators.

Intro to Blueflood
One of the most unique products in the Cloud Monitoring portfolio is Blueflood, the database backend for the monitoring system at Rackspace. It is designed and built to withstand bombardments of data from many of our Scribe nodes. Blueflood is generally used in a demanding production environment. It scales easily to keep up with ever-increasing workloads, and it is expected to operate smoothly when facing unexpected data center failures.

Although the team that oversees Blueflood is tasked with tons of responsibilities, we are the smallest group within the Cloud Monitoring product team at Rackspace. We recently open sourced Blueflood. Here’s an excellent blog post about it.The Need for Search
The Blueflood team and I are working on implementing Blueflood’s Metrics Discovery feature. Our current capability is very Cloud Monitoring specific. The existing API allows users to ask for all metrics for a given entityId and checkId. Blueflood’s internal use of Cassandra as its database backend does not lend itself well to search. Our implementation is interesting in that Blueflood stores clients’ locators (strings in the form of accountId.entityId.checkId) and metrics as rows and columns in Cassandra.

We would also like to support metrics discovery via glob matching. So for example, a query of the form acctId.*.chkId.* would return all metrics with the specified accountId and checkId regardless of their entities. This feature is useful in supporting a Graphite-like querying, where we could ask for CPU utilization rates across all data centers and nodes with a simple one-line query, as opposed to asking for that metric for each individual node.

What and Why?
It’s pretty easy to think of ElasticSearch as a group of Apache Lucene workers. Lucene is an open source full text search library. Full text search allows you to do things like search for the number of occurrences of a certain word in an essay. ElasticSearch implements other useful functionalities on top of Lucene, such as a HTTP interface, nodes discovery or workload management among Lucene workers. These extra functionalities allow ElasticSearch to be used as a distributed search server, providing a scalable search solution.

We are using ElasticSearch in our pilot experiment to determine the feasibility of implementing Metrics Discovery feature in Blueflood. For the final product that will eventually be used in production, we are also considering Apache Solr.

ElasticSearch Quirks
As the backend for the monitoring system, we need a service offering high availability. As a SaaS product, we need to make it easy to scale our service. A cluster with a good configuration offers these benefits. The challenge is that configuring an ElasticSearch cluster is not a trivial task.

For scalability, we want to avoid the situation when a search request travels across multiple nodes before hitting the right one. Routing that search request into specific index and shard can help avoid this. For example, we can route all metric data associated with the same user into the same index and shard. This makes sense since the most common use case involves searching for data that all belongs to a single account. We achieve a performance gain during retrieval by specifying the correct index and shard. In our experiment, we have determined that routing requests correctly can speed up the process by a staggering 30-50%.

We have also found that there are issues with not pre-initializing indices before indexing documents. ElasticSearch will automatically create an index for you if that index does not already exist. This can be prohibitively expensive as hundreds of requests can arrive at the cluster simultaneously and cause the cluster to go down. It is much more effective to pre-initialize indices. In our experiment, we have found that it takes about one hour to initialize 5,120 shards (128 indices, 20 shards each, 1 replica, 2 nodes). Moreover, we have found that our nodes were very much CPU-bound during initialization.

The Future
There are many deployment-related issues that still need to be considered, such as the number of nodes needed to support our traffic and the cluster’s topology. We also need a chef recipe. We also have not fully investigated the impact of tagging metrics with arbitrary annotation on ElasticSearch’s performance. In theory, arbitrary annotations can create a large number of fields, which could cause performance issues.

The Rackspace San Francisco Internship Program develops technical skills in interns while also supporting integration into the office culture. Want to join the team? Rackspace San Francisco is now accepting résumés for Summer 2014 Internships. Email your résumé to SFjobs@rackspace.com or join us at one of these career events: Oregon State University School of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science Senior Dinner October 23rd; Oregon State University Engineering Career Fair October 24th; UC Berkeley Engineering and Science Career Fair September 18th.

]]>http://www.rackspace.com/blog/blueflood-metrics-discovery-implementing-search/feed/0The Path To Master Programmerhttp://www.rackspace.com/blog/the-path-to-master-programmer/
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/the-path-to-master-programmer/#commentsWed, 11 Sep 2013 15:00:41 +0000http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=32310This summer, we brought several interns aboard at our San Francisco Office (SFO). In this blog series, these interns share tales of their times as Rackspace summer interns.

I’m a software engineering intern at Rackspace and a computer science major at Rutgers University. This summer I’ve been working on data visualization for Cloud Monitoring. This means I’ve contributed to glimpse.js, an open source graphing library built on top of d3.js. I created a new graph type, worked on annotations and learned angular.js. I’ve felt like a valued member of my team since the start.

In a classroom setting, college students learn theory and try to understand how things work. But at Rackspace, interns actually do hands-on work and learn how things get done in practice. Between these two identities, I’ve learned lots, but in completely different contexts. Here at Rackspace I’ve seen real masters at work and witnessed how powerful their experiences are. Because I don’t currently have the same level of expertise, I’m interested in the path one takes to becoming a master programmer. This is not something I could have learned in school by sitting in a classroom.

My months at Rackspace have put me in day-to-day contact with some of the top minds in computer programming. I’ve noticed that masters at work have three common traits: learning, collaboration, and passion.

Learning

When I asked for advice about how to get better, the answer was almost always the same: “Just build something, man.” Reading is helpful, but writing code is more important. Good programmers have written lots of bad code and have learned from it. Learning by writing code is hard and involves struggle, but there is really no way around it. The masters I’ve met at Rackspace have learned how to embrace this struggle.

The incredible coders around me have patience and curiosity. One example that strikes me is when Jordan, a fellow intern, gave a talk in which he staged and committed changes using only git plumbing commands. When asked about where he learned this, he responded that the git man pages were very good.

Masters treat the code like a wet clay sculpture. They throw on new ideas and peel away others that they don’t like. When I started, I treated the code like marble. I was afraid I would chip off the nose so I would only make changes that I knew wouldn’t break anything. Only after watching Rackers with more experience did I realize I could experiment and play with the code more. And that experimentation is critical to understanding the code.

Collaboration

Programmers at Rackspace produce quality code, and team interaction is critical to that production. My team held “The State of the Code Address” every Friday, where each of us showed off a neat trick or algorithm that we wrote earlier that week. We noticed that none of our meetings were code oriented, so we made one. These were low pressure meetings that often evolved into conversations about the latest releases of Bootstrap or Angular.

“Choose-your-own-adventure” hackathons are held once a month, where programmers work on whatever interests them. We also have weekly tech talks, where team members share a technology they are working with. These types of dialogues contribute to creating a community space where people are interested and passionate about their work.

Passion

I saw so many examples of co-workers letting go of their egos and being subsumed into the task they were working on. I remember lots of heated debates about code implementation. Working in an office where people debate is a good sign; it indicates that people care about their work.

I like puzzles, especially ones that highlight interesting ways of solving complicated problems. I’ve found that these brainteasers are a great way of breaking out of stale thinking and approaching my work creatively. I shared one puzzle with some of the folks at the office and figured that someone would eventually get it solved. Imagine my surprise when I learned that Justin Gallardo, an engineer on our Monitoring-as-a-Service product, had solved it with an elegant little piece of coding. Despite the fact that he programs for a living, he squeezed in time to write extra code on his commute to the office. It really showed me something about passion and the desire to solve interesting problems in programming—even silly little puzzles.

In the years it takes to become an excellent programmer I’m going to keep in mind the learning, collaboration and passion I saw here at Rackspace.

The Rackspace San Francisco Internship Program develops technical skills in interns while also supporting integration into the office culture. Want to join the team? Rackspace San Francisco is now accepting résumés for Summer 2014 Internships. Email your résumé to SFjobs@rackspace.com or join us at one of these career events: Oregon State University School of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science Senior Dinner October 23rd; Oregon State University Engineering Career Fair October 24th; UC Berkeley Engineering and Science Career Fair September 18th.

]]>http://www.rackspace.com/blog/the-path-to-master-programmer/feed/0Geekdom Opens In San Francisco: Get Involved In A Developer-Centric Workspacehttp://www.rackspace.com/blog/geekdom-opens-in-san-francisco-get-involved-in-a-developer-centric-workspace/
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/geekdom-opens-in-san-francisco-get-involved-in-a-developer-centric-workspace/#commentsThu, 05 Sep 2013 20:30:21 +0000http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=32747Today, Geekdom San Francisco opens its doors to provide a new home for developers and startups alike. If you’re working on developer-focused opportunities, or are building something intimately connected to cloud computing, there’s no better place to be close to the action.

Operated under the Rackspace umbrella and inspired by the success of Geekdom San Antonio, Geekdom SF members will have the opportunity to work intimately with OpenStack, Rackspace and industry experts to move their companies forward. It’s no secret Rackspace loves developers, from developer support to developer discounts, and now a place to call home in San Francisco.

Geekdom SF is located on the ground floor of 620 Folsom St. in SoMa, in the same building as our San Francisco offices and Robert Scoble’s studio. As a member, you’ll have easy access to our engineers, and further mentorship from our own entrepreneurs who have built their own successful companies. Let your startup benefit by joining us here.

Members will also receive discounts on our cloud services, marketing opportunities, plus various other perks through the Rackspace Startup Program. We’re also building an environment that is both engaging and creative. From learning how to tune a bike, to volunteering in the community, to karaoke sessions; participation in our community extends beyond just product.

When Geekdom opened its doors in San Antonio in 2011, it quickly became a hotspot for technology enthusiasts. It created a mentorship program attracting talent from all across Texas and also became home to the Techstars Cloud program. Its formula for success has been to put in to the community as much as you get out of it.

That’s a spirit we’re carrying forward here in San Francisco. You should get involved and build something great here.

]]>http://www.rackspace.com/blog/geekdom-opens-in-san-francisco-get-involved-in-a-developer-centric-workspace/feed/0Building The Cloud Monitoring Dashboardhttp://www.rackspace.com/blog/building-the-cloud-monitoring-dashboard/
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/building-the-cloud-monitoring-dashboard/#commentsWed, 04 Sep 2013 15:00:03 +0000http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=32444This summer, we brought several interns aboard at our San Francisco Office (SFO). In this blog series, these interns share tales of their times as Rackspace summer interns.

As my internship at Rackspace San Francisco nears its conclusion, so does one of the most insightful and fun summers I’ve ever had. To say my internship was a learning experience would be quite the understatement.

Learning The Technologies

In my first few days with the company, I dove into an ocean of technologies I had never worked with before. On top of that, there was a massive codebase driving Cloud Monitoring I needed to become familiar with to start working on projects that would be thrown my way over the coming months. Rackspace’s Cloud Monitoring product is a conglomerate of different components that function together to create a robust and fault-tolerant system for customers to monitor their own products and services. Some components are written in Javascript, others Java and Python; even lesser-known languages like Erlang, Scala, and Lua also make an appearance. Needless to say, I had my work cut out for me.

The dashboard project had me working primarily with Javascript and the Node.js platform. It took me a little while to adjust to the myriad Javascript libraries available to me when making the dashboard. Libraries such as Async, Underscore and Express (just to name a few) were added to my rapidly-growing list of tools to become familiar with. Blueflood, a metrics aggregation system recently open-sourced by Rackspace, became critical to the operation of my project. I also spent some time working with Glimpse, Rackspace’s open source graphing library specifically created for use with dashboards, to create the charts that show the metrics. I also had to dabble in Chef, a tool for configuration management.

It wasn’t just getting up to speed with technology that was a challenge. Thinking about the new paradigms and problems before me was also quite the endeavor. Many of these problems involve the distributed highly-fault-tolerant nature of Cloud Monitoring. The metrics that power the dashboard would have to come from multiple servers in multiple datacenters, so the task would not be as simple as making a single request to get the data. Other problems like caching also became important, as fetching and rolling up metrics for every web request creates a serious computational overhead that would make the page load take far too long. Even UI design issues cropped up when designing the front-end for the dashboard. Whatever problems came up my mentor as well as other Rackers on my team and in the office were always there to help.

SFO Culture

The Rackers and the company culture here in San Francisco was certainly one of the highlights of my experience. The San Francisco office is a melting pot of brilliant people trying to change the company through innovation, and their passion for the products and services they create shows. Our bi-weekly team status meetings, where team members flesh out MaaS features and design-decisions, exemplify this passion. Oftentimes the team would enter the meetings with each person having a different idea of how something should be done, but after thoroughly deliberating the problem and its implications for developers, operations and the customer, a general consensus was always reached; even if it took a follow-up meeting. For an intern, these meetings were a way to learn how Cloud Monitoring works as well as gain valuable insight into new distributed computing concepts and technologies.

Eating Our Own Dog Food

Armed with five years of computer science education and a fledgling of knowledge surrounding the Cloud Monitoring project, I set out to create the Cloud Monitoring dashboard. The creation of the dashboard centered on the idea of dogfooding. Dogfooding, in the computer software world, means using the products you create (akin to eating the dogfood you give to your dog, in a strange sense). For the purpose of Cloud Monitoring, this means using our own monitoring product to monitor our monitoring product, a process we have deemed “monitoring-ception.” By monitoring ourselves, we show our customers the robustness of our system, as well as get some insight into areas that need improvement.

The dashboard relies on a few different components developed here at Rackspace. The Rackspace Monitoring Agent, a tool customers (and Rackspace alike) can use to monitor CPU, memory, disk and network usage can also be used to emit custom metrics to Cloud Monitoring. Blueflood stores and rolls up these metrics once they pass through the system. These, combined with a custom statsd backend to write performance metrics to disk, was used to emit performance characteristics from our Cloud Monitoring system to itself using Blueflood — a second dose of dogfooding. Once the custom metrics data makes it into Blueflood, it can be queried and rolled up using the Rackspace public API. The dashboard queries the API to get this data, which is then graphed over a few different time periods using the Glimpse library, the open source graphing library also developed at Rackspace.

The dashboard, as seen above, allows customers to view the status of as well as performance metrics related to the Cloud Monitoring product. The various performance metrics can be plotted over different time periods by clicking the tabs corresponding to each relative time-range. The status fields of the various Cloud Monitoring systems will change to alert users if something problematic is happening, or if a deployment is in progress in that region. Links to documentation, feedback, as well as the command line utility, are presented the top of the page to provide an easy way to access that information.

Seeing the dashboard evolve from a simple mockup as a hackday project into a full-on data-driven application has been an amazing journey. I can’t say it hasn’t been arduous at times, but I always had my team and mentor there when I hit a rough patch. It’s been a great summer here in San Francisco. I’ve learned a great deal, faced a lot of challenges and experienced working with some awesome Rackers (not to mention making a ton of connections). It’s a summer experience everyone should have, and few actually get, and I couldn’t be happier that I got to be here for it.

The Rackspace San Francisco Internship Program develops technical skills in interns while also supporting integration into the office culture. Want to join the team? Rackspace San Francisco is now accepting résumés for Summer 2014 Internships. Email your résumé to SFjobs@rackspace.com or join us at one of these career events: Oregon State University School of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science Senior Dinner October 23rd; Oregon State University Engineering Career Fair October 24th; UC Berkeley Engineering and Science Career Fair September 18th.

]]>http://www.rackspace.com/blog/building-the-cloud-monitoring-dashboard/feed/0Rackspace Culture: Annual San Francisco Bike-B-Qhttp://www.rackspace.com/blog/rackspace-culture-annual-san-francisco-bike-b-q/
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/rackspace-culture-annual-san-francisco-bike-b-q/#commentsFri, 30 Aug 2013 19:00:40 +0000http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=32569Once you’ve got a decent number of bike riders and an award-winning bike workshop and bike parking area, what do you do next? A Bike-B-Q, of course. I can’t take credit for this idea, but it’s worked out quite well for us so far to further our bike-friendly culture at the Rackspace San Francisco office (SFO).

The basic idea is this: everybody bikes from the office to a picnic, as part of one or more packs. There’s a seasoned city rider who knows the route well at the beginning and at the end of the pack, so nobody gets left behind. And we’ve got a safety briefing beforehand to remind people about the rules of the road in SF for bikes.

There’s a certain art to finding a route because you want to avoid hills and unsafe intersections. I have no problem climbing any hill in San Francisco, but the people who aren’t accomplished riders are going to be unhappy if they end up walking uphill for most of the route. In San Francisco, we’ve got the Wiggle, which is a magical perfectly flat route across the city, so we’ve used that in the past.

Other than that, it’s an office picnic, room for a game of football, slacklining, Calvinball, or lawn darts. Usually there will be a few people who will drive some of the picnic gear there, but we’ve usually had a decent pack of people biking all the way there.

Riding in a pack is more fun than riding alone. You can support each other as you push up hills, watch out for cars together and relax a bit more than you do when you ride alone. It’s a great way to get people to realize, after biking all of the way across San Francisco, that it’s not as hard as they thought it was. Or that riding in the city on the streets is not nearly as bad as it might look from the sidewalk. It’s always great to see a few more bikes parked in our facility after an event like this.

Photos by Nathan Jordan

]]>http://www.rackspace.com/blog/rackspace-culture-annual-san-francisco-bike-b-q/feed/0My Priority List Today, Tomorrow And Every Day After Thathttp://www.rackspace.com/blog/my-priority-list-today-tomorrow-and-every-day-after-that/
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/my-priority-list-today-tomorrow-and-every-day-after-that/#commentsWed, 28 Aug 2013 15:00:30 +0000http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=32131This summer, we brought several interns aboard at our San Francisco Office (SFO). In this blog series, these interns share tales of their times as Rackspace summer interns.

I’ve never been good at multitasking. I spent my free time in college doing an incredibly repetitive and monotonous sport: rowing. Maybe I chose to row because receiving more than one instruction at a time would’ve fried my brain. I’ve always been capable of focusing on the task at hand, but nothing I encountered in school had ever challenged my ability to prioritize until this summer, when I was hired to work as a software developer at Rackspace.

I work on the Airbrake team, which as a recently acquired company is going through a major technical migration. We have the personality of a startup, where everyone plays multiple roles during the day, but this kind of rapid-fire agenda was completely new to me.

The only other places I’ve worked are sleepy research labs where projects took months to come to fruition. At those jobs I didn’t have a mission-critical role, so my colleagues didn’t rely exclusively on my work for success.

That’s not the case for people hired to work at Rackspace. Since becoming a Racker, I’ve had to react quickly in a fast-paced workplace, where each task seems critical and time-sensitive.

Oftentimes I’ve had to choose what tasks I was going to ignore that day. Will it be customer acquisition and funnel optimization? How about the impending migration deadline? Or will I have to rush through new hire onboarding? For the first time in my life, I’ve been placed in the driver’s seat and given the responsibility of making crucial decisions with far-reaching consequences. I often found myself asking: what was I even hired to do? My title says “software engineer,” but I spent just as much time on marketing and operations. When I was first hired, I found myself doing odd jobs to satisfy my need to feel productive, although I didn’t see how any of these tasks fit together. I’d get halfway towards finishing something and then get sidetracked by a new priority, like a sailboat without a rudder.

It all came to a halt with a front-page thread on Hacker News, in which most commenters who mentioned our product did so disparagingly. It was brutal, and I was surprised to hear their criticisms. At that moment, I realized that I was out of touch with the customers who use my product.

For the first time at work, I decided to make my own priority: find a way to get in touch with those people and find out why they feel the way they do about our product. So I dug for customers’ email addresses, sent each of them a message, and waited. By the end of the day, I received three replies. The following day, nearly everyone I emailed responded. I followed up, I lunched with one, I Skyped with another, and I learned where our product stood in the eyes of the customer, and what I could do to help my customers succeed.

More importantly, I had discovered why I was hired: to help customers and my co-workers achieve their goals. If I can’t do that, why should I expect to receive a paycheck at all? And it became so much clearer what I had to do when I came into work the next day. I solved my multitasking problem by realizing that there was only ever one task that mattered, and everything else was secondary.

It’s easy to get lost in the details of what you’re doing every day. But whenever I’m in the twilight of productivity, I remind myself that if I’m not helping customers or coworkers, then I’m not working on the right task.

What makes Rackspace special is that our business can only succeed if our customers succeed. Our company isn’t built on one-off inventions, arbitrage or psychological tricks. We have a simple goal, and that’s to put our customers at the forefront of everything we do. Now that I’ve learned this important lesson, I can’t think of a better place to put it into action than here.

The Rackspace San Francisco Internship Program develops technical skills in interns while also supporting integration into the office culture. Want to join the team? Rackspace San Francisco is now accepting résumés for Summer 2014 Internships. Email your résumé to SFjobs@rackspace.com or join us at one of these career events: Oregon State University School of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science Senior Dinner October 23rd; Oregon State University Engineering Career Fair October 24th; UC Berkeley Engineering and Science Career Fair September 18th.